MOUNTAIN VIEW: Where’d the Rain Go?

The underground water table gets its supply from only one source: the moisture which falls on the surface of the land.

Jay N. Darling

By LIZA FIELD

While we had some blessed rainstorms last week, NASA was discovering water molecules within the dirt of Mars. Officials celebrated with champagne (from earth), but I found myself wishing they could also make a link between this extraterrestrial discovery of the most precious substance known to man—and our handling of water here, on the planet lying so close we cannot see it.

How eye-opening it would be to teach all Americans, from kindergarten up, that we are all walking on water. Even though we can’t see it, the biggest water reserve in the U.S. lies beneath our feet. And we’re draining it, pretty much in oblivion.

“It’s worse each summer season,” says Charles Falwell, vice president of Falwell Corp., which has been drilling wells in Central Virginia since the Great Depression. Where his customers once could get a productive well at less than 250 feet deep, these older wells are drying up, and new wells have to be dug at least 400 feet deep.

Steve Rosenbaum, down in Grayson County, told me the same thing two summers ago. He and his father had also been digging wells for decades, and were now having to dig twice as far as his father once did. “Dad also said the New River used to run high and stay high. Now you can about walk across it.”

This is the New River that my friend Mildred, now in her 80’s, indeed used to walk across to school, when she was growing up near Austinville. But that’s because the river froze—solid—even a foot down, to the point where frozen blocks were harvested for the ice houses and summertime “ice boxes.”

These days, it’s hard to find a winter that will even freeze enough inches on a cow pond for safe ice-skating. As for low river flows, drying-up wells and springs and the dropping water table, “the biggest problem is we just haven’t had the snow,” said Falwell.

A layer of nice cold snow (which sounds lovely about right now) sits on the ground a while, letting the snow-melt seep slowly into the soil rather than rolling quickly off into stormwater, as a summer gully-washer might.

But a lack of snow is only part of the problem. The hotter summers and warmer temperatures year round are causing more evaporation, faster, and provoke more water use by the human community. And there’s been below-normal rainfall in several recent years.

What rain does fall, increasingly meets a hostile barrier. A developed area of rooftops, impervious parking lots and roads—along with a lack of shade-trees and ground-protecting humus—create the effect of a vast, waterproof platter plunked over the earth’s surface, shunting off rainfall instead of catching and allowing it to recharge the groundwater.

”We get these big thunderstorms, and 90% of the water runs off and doesn’t soak into the ground,” says Falwell. Where does that water it go?

In my town, most stormwater runs down street gullies and storm-drains, finally pouring straight into a few small streams that weren’t made to contain this sudden volume. So an average rainfall can make our “Town Branch” look like a roiling, turbid brown flood full of silt, motor oils, chemicals, cigarette butts, plastic bags, car-wash detergent, dog droppings and any other material the human community has left on the street, sidewalks or parking lots.

State regulations now require stormwater detention ponds for large expanses of asphalt, but the Virginia Tech Water Center notes that these ponds filter out only a small amount of the motor oils, chemicals and salts from parking lots—and the water ultimately still ends up flowing downstream, rather than recharging groundwater.

Thus, would-be-welcome rainwater, bearing our additional ingredients, flows downstream into Reed Creek, then down the New River, the Ohio, and ultimately the enormous and growing dead zone at the Gulf of Mexico. Back home, the ground has already dried out, having retained very little of that precipitation.

So we end up with two problems (or more), from rainfalls that should have been a blessing—the pollution of surface water and continued depletion of groundwater.

What could communities be doing with each rainfall, instead?

If we endowed water with the value it truly has, and envisioned it as drops of a divine, life-giving elixir falling from the sky, we’d want to run outside and catch every splatter in containers.

But since a person can’t catch much rain in a bucket, and since Nature’s “bucket” is the entire broad expanse of a landscape, we’d work ahead of time to make sure the land’s bucket was turned up—not left upside-down over the land like an umbrella.

I’ll discuss ways some innovators are repositioning the big bucket next week.